


life worth missing

by serpentheir



Series: how it goes [3]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Goodbyes, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-18 18:28:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29122656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serpentheir/pseuds/serpentheir
Summary: It’s been said the world will end not with a bang, but a whimper. For Jughead, it comes with the hiss of a bus’s air brake.Archie stands up and shoves his hands into the pockets of his letterman. He doesn’t even have any bags with him.People start to unload from the bus, milling around and chattering as the driver opens the baggage compartment. Jughead glances back at Archie, then back at the bus, then at Archie, as if he can force the two images to make sense together in his brain.Archie is leaving. Archie isleaving.
Relationships: Archie Andrews/Jughead Jones
Series: how it goes [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1760659
Comments: 12
Kudos: 28





	life worth missing

**Author's Note:**

> yeah so whatever the cw pulls on wednesday is gonna be wack, this is my personal canon <3  
> title is from [the song by car seat headrest](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKQ09dij4E0) \-- highly recommended that u listen to it while reading :-)  
> this is loosely tied into the "how it goes" series; it'll make sense regardless of whether you've read the others in the series but they'll provide some context esp with barcheating!

> _Do I care if I survive this? Bury the dead where they’re found_
> 
> _In a veil of great surprises; I wonder, did you love me at all?_
> 
> \- "The Only Thing" (Sufjan Stevens)

When Jughead pulls up to the bus station, he jumps off his bike without a second of hesitation and runs indoors. He scans the room for any sign of Archie, but it’s empty other than him and the ticket clerk.

“Has anyone come in here in the last, like, 30 minutes?” he asks.

The clerk seems to communicate something with her eyes that Jughead can’t quite decipher, and tilts her head to the left, gesturing to the row of benches alongside the road by the bus stop.

“Thanks,” he breathes, and he’s back out the door before it’s even shut all the way.

Once he sees Archie, sitting on one of the benches silhouetted against the late-afternoon sky, it takes a significant amount willpower to avoid breaking into a sprint. Instead, he counts to four over and over as he walks, measuring inhales and exhales, and finally sits down lightly next to Archie.

“Hey,” he offers.

“Hey,” Archie returns.

Jughead kicks the heel of his boot into the gravel with a satisfying crunch, then does it again. Archie looks up for a split second, and the slight movement launches Jughead’s thoughts into a tornado all over again.

He sits up straighter and turns toward Archie. Maybe they can still work this out. “Don’t….don’t go. Okay?”

Archie looks back at the ground. His mouth settles into a hard line, and Jughead can practically feel him trying to shut the conversation down.

Jughead continues anyways. “You don’t have to leave, you know. You didn’t do anything wrong. I know you’re, like, convinced that you’re some kind of burden on all of us, or that you’re ruining people’s lives by being around them, but it’s not true. I should’ve said this a long time ago, I’m sorry, I just – I didn’t think you were gonna _leave_.”

“Why?” Archie turns towards Jughead, eyes glassy like he’d been crying but stopped a while ago.

“What do you mean?”

“Why _wouldn’t_ I leave? You always wanted to. Everyone wants to. That’s what growing up in Riverdale is about, right? Getting out?”

Jughead tries to retrace the steps of their conversation to the ones preceding it, looking for any possible inklings of what this could really be about – what really started it. It’s been a long time since any of their problems were just with the issue at hand.

He comes up blank.

Archie takes a deep breath. “The only person I ever knew who stayed in Riverdale their entire life and was actually _happy_ about it was my dad. And look how that turned out for him.”

Jughead crosses his arms over his chest. He always forgets how cold spring nights are. “Well, but – okay, but you can’t just leave because everything is fucked up. Can we talk about this?”

Archie runs a hand through his hair and something about the gesture makes him look suddenly decades older – and uncannily like Fred.

“I’m sorry, Jughead,” Archie says, and even the exhaustion in his voice is familiar, too, passed down through god knows how many generations that gave the world more than they got in return.

Jughead’s stomach starts to turn horribly. A question itches at the back of his thoughts.

“How long have you had this planned, Arch? I thought you were gonna stay here for a while after graduation, just to figure things out, to figure out where you wanna go—”

Archie shakes his head. “There’s just…nothing here for me anymore.”

Jughead gapes. “What? You’re fucking with me.” _Me,_ he thinks selfishly. _I’m here. Please let that matter_.

“People love you," he continues, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. "Can’t you see that? People here, they care about you."

The silence between them starts to fill with quiet chatter as crickets start chirping. The cliche makes the conversation even more surreal. This is a joke, or a dream, or a hallucination, and he'll wake up soon and Fred will be taking pictures of the four of them in their graduation gowns, straightening Archie's mortarboard and getting teary-eyed despite Archie's embarrassed protests.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. What was the point of graduating – of making it through the last four hellish fucking years – if Archie was going to skip town and leave all of them behind?

"I’m not like you, Arch. No one is. You have more…more generosity, more compassion, more fucking humanity than anyone here.” Archie’s face is still expressionless. “You're the only soul this town has left. You – you _are_ Riverdale.”

Archie laughs dryly. “Exactly. That’s the problem. People look at me – even you, even my mom, even my _dad_ , for god’s sake – and they think I’m some kind of innocent saint who was put on this earth to, like, prove that empathy and goodness still exist. And I fell for that for a long time. I play the part well enough, I guess. But it’s a lie.

Archie takes a deep breath. "I’m _just like_ this fucking place. There’s something wrong with me. I’m rotting from the inside out.”

Jughead can’t feel his face well enough to know what expression he’s making, and Archie isn’t giving him anything. He’s starting to feel like an animal being taken out to the back of the shed.

“So you’re just gonna…give up? You’re gonna go, what, fucking die in combat or something? That’s how you wanna leave this planet?”

Archie stays silent.

“Well, fine,” Jughead says, standing up as if he’s going to leave even though it’s the last thing he wants. “Don’t let me stop you from being a cog in the machine of neoliberalism if that’s your dream. Sorry for thinking you were different.”

“Sorry for thinking _you_ were different, too. What happened to…what happened to all the times I told you about New York, about how we could get out of here and actually _do_ something with our lives?" Archie's eyes bore into Jughead's. "Sorry for thinking I was more than a back-up plan in case Ivy League life with your girlfriend didn’t work out.”

Jughead opens his mouth but no words come out. He sits back down on the bench, eyes locked on the ground.

"Like I was the only one pulling that shit. You and Veronica were surgically attached for, like, two years straight. You wanna talk about feeling like a back-up plan? I couldn't tell if you even remembered I _existed_. I was just...here. The whole time. I was fucking _waiting_ for you to do something, or say something, and there were so many times when you could've done something but you just...you just shut down."

Jughead takes a shaky, slow breath. If he turns his emotional brain off, he's rationally aware that this could very well be the last time he sees Archie. For a long time. If ever. 

He's not even remotely near processing that fact, but if it is true, he doesn't want their last conversation to play out like this. He tries to make himself relax, hoping Archie will notice and sense that he doesn't want to fight.

“Honestly," Jughead says softly, "I didn’t think you actually wanted it.” Memories start to play over in his head, a flipbook of desperate hope: all the times Archie had talked about wanting to escape with him - and then all the times Jughead had gone home and researched the prices for bus tickets to New York. The conversations he’d had with Serpents living in the city, to figure out who could put him and Archie up if they needed to couch-surf for a few days. All the time they'd spent making plans for the road trip that ended up D.O.A.

“I think—" Archie clears his throat, but his voice still comes out in a whisper. "I think it's the only thing I ever really wanted."

The silence between them yawns open, stifling but volatile, and laced with electricity that threatens to explode from the tiniest spark. There’s so much to say that Jughead can’t think of anything to say at all.

It’s been said the world will end not with a bang, but a whimper. For Jughead, it comes with the hiss of a bus’s air brake.

Archie stands up and shoves his hands into the pockets of his letterman. He doesn’t even have any bags with him.

People start to unload from the bus, milling around and chattering as the driver opens the baggage compartment. Jughead glances back at Archie, then back at the bus, then at Archie, as if he can force the two images to make sense together in his brain.

Archie is leaving. Archie is _leaving_.

The driver calls out “Albany,” and the two of them are silent as the outbound passengers file onto the bus.

“There’s a base there,” Archie explains.

Jughead just looks at him.

“Please don’t worry about me. Okay? You’re gonna – you’ll have a great time in college, I know it’s gonna be perfect for you, and—”

“What are you _talking_ about, Archie?” Jughead grabs onto his shoulders and holds on tight. “I don’t fucking care about college, I don’t – I don’t care where I go, okay? The University of Iowa doesn’t mean shit to me, not compared to you.”

Like a broken record, Archie just shakes his head and says, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not too late. You can stay, we can fix this, we can get you help—”

“I can’t. I’m sorry. It’s too late. It’s not your fault.”

Jughead wipes a tear from his face harshly, whispering _“shit”_ under his breath when the zipper on his sleeve leaves a thin cut along his cheekbone. A hot trickle of blood snakes its way down the side of his face and he wipes that away, too.

“What am I supposed to do?” Jughead asks. "Go back to Betty? _Now?"_

The dig has its intended effect; Archie bristles and looks away. “You’ll figure something out.”

The bus’s air brakes hiss again, indicating that they’re about to leave. Archie glances over at the driver, then back at Jughead.

“Am I going to see you again?” Jughead asks, feeling like a cliché out of an awful romance movie.

“I don’t know,” Archie says, and the air falls silent between them again.

“Can I hug you?” Archie asks suddenly.

“In front of this entire town?” Jughead says before he can help it. He tacks on what he hopes looks like a smile.

Archie tries to smile back. “Yeah. In front of the entire town.”

Jughead nods, and when Archie reaches for him, he holds on as tight as he can.

He tries to memorize how it feels, every single detail. The comforting pressure of Archie’s palms where they’re splayed out across the small of his back. The threads Jughead can see sticking out of the back of Archie’s collar where he always cuts the tags off. The barely-noticeable strain in his neck he’d felt every time they’d hugged since Archie first surpassed him in height. At first, Jughead would pretend it was embarrassing that their height difference practically made him rest his head on Archie’s chest. _I’m not_ that _short,_ he’d always say. _But do it again, I wanna make sure you didn't get taller overnight._

He can’t remember the last time he’d hugged Archie. It’s a small gesture, but it’d always contained more for Jughead than it did for most other people.

Archie gave out hugs like he did Valentines in elementary school: one for anyone who wants one, because he wanted everyone to feel included. Jughead had always avoided physical contact with other people; even with Archie at first, he would do little more than _allow_ himself to be hugged.

He’d first realized there might’ve been something more going on way back then, when his mind would drift off during class to daydreams about Archie holding him. Archie’s bigger now, obviously; a little taller and a lot less scrawny, but it makes Jughead feel small in a way that isn’t entirely unpleasant – isn’t unpleasant at all, really.

“Hey,” Jughead murmurs against Archie’s shoulder. “You know, I don’t think we ever figured it out.”

“Figured what out?” Archie asks.

“Well. I'd say we filled the quota of ‘many burgers and many days'. So, what’s the verdict? Friends?” Jughead tries to smile where his face is still pressed against Archie's chest, but tears sting at his eyes and he squeezes them shut. They both know what he's trying to ask.

Something inside Jughead thaws when he feels Archie laugh a little, too. When Archie pulls back to look him in the eyes, though, he looks serious. They both know what he's trying to ask, and they both know Archie can't answer it. Jughead stares back at him levelly, trying to read anything he can in Archie’s expression even though his skin crawls with the desire to curl in on himself and avoid feeling so _seen_.

“Well?” Jughead asks, shifting.

Archie smiles, just a tiny quirk of the lips. “I think…” he starts, then cuts himself off as he in a sudden surge of movement towards Jughead. Everything happens at once – Archie’s hands on his face, breath ghosting over the scrape on Jughead’s cheekbone, and then Jughead is kissing back before he even realizes what’s happening, hands fisted in the front of Archie’s jacket to keep from falling over.

For a split second, everything is warmth and closeness and _finally_. But then it’s over as quickly as it began, and Archie takes one last look at him before turning and bounding up the steps to the bus.

Jughead stands there, motionless, trying to watch Archie through the windows for as long as he can, until he’s just a tiny red dot in the distance and the bus vanishes into the long stretch of highway ahead.

He stands there for a long time, until his legs and feet are numb, until the blood from the cut on his cheek drips into his mouth. Eventually all he can taste is metal, and he can’t feel the memory of Archie’s lips anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> sorry for being evil <3  
> there will Probably be a part 4 coming for this series so keep ur eyes peeled maybe  
> comment if this made you upset cause same here!!!


End file.
